A Girl Like That(35)



“Hey,” she said. “It’s Zarin. Come get me, will you? Text me on this number when you get here.”

“What’s wrong?” I asked, but she had already hung up by then. A part of me was irritated. Who did this girl think she was? But another, larger part was deeply curious. I knew a little about Zarin’s parents from the bits and pieces of information floating around Cama colony when I lived there.

Women had shared stories about Zarin’s mother, Dina, the colony beauty who could have married any man she wanted, but instead started working at a cabaret bar once Zarin’s great-grandfather died.

“My brother offered to help her, you know,” Persis, the Dog Lady, told anyone who would listen. “He said he would marry her, give her a home. But she refused! Said she didn’t want to marry someone like him! As if there was something wrong with my brother! Then she went off with that thug and had a baby with him. Mad, I tell you!”

Though Dina eventually moved out of the colony to a fancy apartment in downtown Mumbai, she sometimes showed up to visit her sister—especially after she’d had an argument or a fight with her lover.

The day Zarin’s father came over to the colony was one few had ever forgotten. Once, over drinks, a group of men described to my father how the man rode in through the gates on his Harley, calmly marched up the stairs to Building 4, and put a gun to Dina’s head.

“You have to give our Dina credit, though,” one of the men had said. “She stood her ground, didn’t reveal an ounce of fear. Said she wouldn’t go home with him if he threatened her like that. Little Zarin is just like her, you know. The way she pummeled her cousin the other day! Would have never imagined such a temper on such a small girl. Maybe she gets that from her father.”

Everyone, including Pappa, had laughed at the casual joke. Yet no one ever mentioned or even joked about Dina and Zarin’s father in front of the Wadias—not even the gossipy old Dog Lady. I might have been eight years old back then, but even I could see how the atmosphere shifted when either one of Zarin’s guardians walked in on a gossip session, how quickly voices faded and subjects changed.

Zarin was waiting by the door to her apartment building when I pulled up, her face paler than the last time I’d seen her, clutching a small backpack to her chest.

“You came,” she said, her voice flat. But she was speaking in Gujarati for once and I could feel my annoyance melting away.

“Yeah, I did. You sounded strange. I got worried.”

She sighed and then slipped into the passenger seat. “I didn’t mean to call you like that. I didn’t mean to call anyone. But my masa…” Her head snapped up to the window, where I saw two shadows. A man and a woman, holding each other.

“Could we get out of here first?” she asked irritably.

I frowned. I might have had a crush on this girl, but even I had my limits. I opened my mouth, fully intending to tell her that she couldn’t order me around like that. But then she raised a hand to tuck a stray lock of hair into her scarf. The loose sleeve of her abaya fell to the elbow, revealing a crescent of red and blue circles smudged over her skin.

Seeing the direction of my gaze, she hastily pushed down the sleeve. “What are you looking at?” she snapped.

I gently caught hold of her wrist and pulled the sleeve up again. I would have let her go if she’d struggled, but to my surprise she didn’t really resist my grip. Maybe she simply assumed that I was too strong for her. But when I looked up into her eyes, I realized she was tired.

“How did you get these?” I asked, brushing a thumb over an older bruise, which was now turning yellow.

“Masi’s fingers.”

I looked back up at the window. The shadows were gone. I didn’t even bother asking Zarin if they knew I was with her. I released her hand and shifted the gear into Drive. “Where do you want to go?”

*

Jeddah’s Corniche was the only part of the city that sometimes reminded me of Mumbai. One weekend, I had finally taken my mother out to the central Corniche, a lively patch of coastline bustling with families in the evenings. Arab boys of my age and younger rode beach buggies in the sand and sometimes on the boardwalk. A half hour before sunset, the Jeddah Fountain opened to the public, propelling over a thousand feet of water into the air from the middle of the Red Sea.

We bought corn on the cob from a chatty Malayali who stood behind a bright yellow Mazola Cooking Oil stand and steamed full husks in water before brushing them with butter and sprinkling on salt. He often complained of other hawkers at the southern end of the beach, men who wheeled in corns in barrows and roasted them over open fires, the way they did in India.

“My corn is better,” the Malayali insisted. “Sweeter. And you do not taste charcoal in your mouth. Right, no?”

“Right,” I said. I did not tell him that the charcoal taste was associated with some of my happiest memories of my father and of Mumbai.

On bad days, when the pain of missing Pappa grew too much and Mamma sat praying next to the altar in our kitchen for hours on end, I drove to the north end of the Corniche to be by myself, to stare at the waves until my body was fooled into thinking that it too was floating with the foam, past the little white Island Mosque with the pink domes, across the Red Sea. I walked along the shore and stood by the rocks near the mosque, a few feet away from the families spread out on mats with bags of sandwiches, packs of Pepsi, and aluminum containers of AlBaik chicken. Children splashed nearby, laughing hysterically in the shallows. Their voices didn’t matter much after a while; the waves that crashed against the craggy rocks often drowned out most noises, allowing the thoughts in my head to turn liquid, to slosh lazily around in my brain and lap at its sides.

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